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Jiro comments on What Can We Learn About Human Psychology from Christian Apologetics? - Less Wrong
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Was her religious background before the posts Catholic? If so, this seems like an astonishing coincidence. Just like people with Christian backgrounds don't get Muslim mystical experiences, they don't convert to Islam by using reason either.
From her blog's About page:
Based on her last name, I'm guessing her ancestral religion (at least on her father's side) is Judaism.
Hmm, that does still say that her boyfriend was Catholic and made her agree to go to Mass. So although that's not her background in the sense of having been raised in it, it's still the one she was most exposed to. and it's still a coincidence that the one she was exposed to happened to be the one that she supposedly rationally concluded was right.
In what sense is this a coincidence? In order to be rationally convinced of an idea, you need to be exposed to the idea. That's not surprising. Now it may be the case that there is some other religion out there, to which she hasn't been properly exposed, that provides more satisfying answers to the questions that motivate her than Catholicism does. But given that she hasn't in fact been exposed to that religion, I don't see how you can blame her (on rational grounds) for not converting to it. I believe in all kinds of scientific theories because they're the most convincing ones I've encountered so far, not because I've evaluated them against every other possible theory.
The choice she made was essentially between atheism and Catholicism (and perhaps a couple of other religions in which she was well schooled), and she decided Catholicism made more sense to her than atheism. You can't blame this on a lack of exposure to atheist arguments, I don't think. She was an atheist blogger (as in, someone who blogs advocating atheism) for a while before converting, and at least somewhat familiar with LW-style rationalism, if I'm not mistaken.
Also, she's not claiming her conversion to Catholicism is the consequence of some mystical experience that had nothing to do with her prior exposure to the religion. If that were the case, I'd understand suspicion that the mystical experience just happened to coincide with the dogma to which she had been exposed. But as far as I can tell, she says she converted to Catholicism precisely because she became immersed in Catholic philosophy and found a lot of it very convincing, so the exposure to Catholicism isn't a coincidence, it's the admitted cause of her conversion.
In order to be rationally convinced of an idea, you do need some level of exposure to an idea. But you don't need the level of exposure that happened here. We don't normally find people suddenly believing in Fermat's Last Theorem because their boyfriend made them go to several months of Fermat's Last Theorem lectures. That's a sign of a meme that bootstraps our existing social structures in order to spread, not of rational thinking.
I agree that her boyfriend convincing her to go to Mass with him is a sign that he at least believed that some form of non-rational persuasion would work (since Mass isn't really about making rational arguments for Catholicism). Still, it's not obvious to me that this was the cause of her conversion. I'm guessing a much bigger factor was what she mentions in the next sentence: the deal they had where they would exchange books arguing for their respective positions.
I think you're underestimating the intellectual strength of Catholic theology, especially of the contemporary Thomist variety. It's miles ahead of any other religious apologetics I've encountered. I've read some of it, and while I'm not even remotely convinced, I can see how it could be extremely convincing to very intelligent people. In fact, I suspect I would have been much more susceptible to conversion if I had read some of this stuff earlier in life, before I read a bunch of philosophy (pragmatism, actually, hence my username) that basically inocculated me against it.
I can't blame her for not concluding that it's true, but I can blame her for concluding that it's false. She knew that there were many, many religions that she hadn't been exposed to. She knew that it would be a huge coincidence for the one she was exposed to to be right. She at least should have been able to guess that there could have been biases that gave a good alternative explanation for this other than that it was a coincidence.
To be fair, the people who converted to atheism probably had some elements of atheism in their environment, too.
But there's only one kind of atheism, and many different kinds of religion, so the observation "isn't it funny that they went with the specific kind that's convenient for non-rational reasons" doesn't really apply.
The atheism of the never-believer is different to that of the deconverted.
At least in the Mormonism of my youth, it is generally acknowledged that converts tend to take their faith more seriously than those born into it. Lasting conversion is not an easy process, and frequently involves both social and internal conflict, so there are selection effects against less-dedicated converts. Additionally, cognitive dissonance and sunk-cost reasoning will tend to make people attach more value to their faith if they had to fight for it. A similar effect in atheism would be unsurprising; deconversion is at least as hard as conversion.
Is this what you had in mind, or did you mean something else? And is this a meaningful distinction to make here, since you can't convert to born Catholicism anyway?
I wasn't aware distinctions were meaningless unless a matter of choice. Makes me rethink the whole life vs death issue.
I'm honestly not sure what you're trying to say here. Can you clarify?
Given that the atheism of a never-believer is different than the atheism of the deconverted (more on this in a moment), the deconverted still only has one of those options actually available to them. "But there's only one kind of atheism [that you can deconvert to]" would still set it apart from the multiple theisms you could convert to.
On the other hand, I don't think I agree that there's only one kind of atheism, nor that the cleanest dividing line is between deconverts and never-believers. In broad strokes all atheists share certain beliefs, but when you zoom out that far, Abrahamic religions start to blend together too.
It may be the case that there is only one kind o atheism that you can convert to. I never said there was more than one kind of atheism you can convert to, I said there was more than one kind of atheism.
How so?
Atheism stands out more. The explanation that you converted for non-rational reasons is just as good as before, but it's less of a coincidence, so this is less evidence of an error in reasoning.
I'm not convinced this is a useful criticism, since we would expect Catholic converts to have been exposed to Catholicism first, even if Catholicism were true. Similarly, we would expect people with non-Islamic backgrounds to not convert to Islam, even if Catholicism were true. Even the religious believe this, which is why missionary work was and is a big deal in various Christian denominations throughout history.
I agree that some exposure is necessary; however, the degree of exposure necessary for conversion to be possible is nowhere near the degree of exposure involved here. At one point I didn't know that there are infinitely many prime numbers, and I had to be exposed to it before I would believe it (since I don't generally go around trying to prove random mathematical statements); but I didn't have to be exposed to months of lectures on the subject or be surrounded by people who made belief in that proposition a cornerstone of social interaction with them.
In the case of missionary work, I'd point out that one reason for missionary work is to force the religion's members to publicly commit to and sacrifice for the religion. It's a type of psychological pressure on believers to make them do things that keep them within the fold, not mainly a way of gaining converts.